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Ask HN: Did any Show HN posts turn into successful startups?

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Re: Ask HN: Did any Show HN posts turn into successful startups?

#81

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

solacelessons wrote: post #72
swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that if a site doesn’t resonate with me, I don’t generally use their services.

If you want to do a quickfix on your site, just change these things:

"You’ve been told to TALK to your audience, but it’s NOT WORKING" → change it as a background color div

"Hell YES I Want It!!!" → remove the pink shadow as well

I get that pink and blue are your colors, but those colors don't pair well together used that way. Either that just reduce the pink shadows by a large margin.

These are the changes it should look like

https://i.imgur.com/G0ekTgX.png

This is all the code I modified

https://i.imgur.com/sIMnapZ.png

and here

https://i.imgur.com/LY6Jci8.png

It still has the correct callout to action but doesn't induce any nausea to your users. I made the fix very quickly, but you should get the general idea. There might be minor tweaks you can make from the suggestions I indicated

If you want to implement these changes on your wordpress site, you can simply just copy paste everything I've written and paste it in your css file, or forward this whole message to your developer.

These are just my personal opinions though, your free to do whatever you want

Re: Ask HN: Did any Show HN posts turn into successful startups?

#83

Post by ThomPete »

jaxtellerSoA wrote: post #80
ThomPete wrote: post #75

Not a successful startup but a successful product. I launched https://www.ghostnoteapp.com in 2015 and it's going really well. Releasing a new version 2.0 and expanding with chrome extensions to allow you to annotate even more specific items. Thanks to HN it became a pretty good success. The original Show HN is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145007

>Not a successful startup but a successful product. What does that mean exactly? Lots of downloads/customers but not enough to be profitable (or not profitable enough to where it was worth the time and energy)? Or is it profitable, but you just don't view your single product as a "start-up", because maybe it is a one-man-show, and not something you do full time?

The latter. It's profitable but I don't consider it a startup as it's "just a product" perhaps at one point when I have expanded the product line enough I would consider it a startup but for now it's just a nice relatively profitable product.

Re: Ask HN: Did any Show HN posts turn into successful startups?

#84

Post by blensor »

ph0rque wrote: post #66
gbersac wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The website of your coach is ugly !!! But your project seems interesting.

One of the most valuable lessons my coach taught me is, "get better at being good enough". She practices what she preaches ;)

As I am getting older that's exactly my take on how to achieve something useful. As software devs we sometimes try to outhink the problem by solving every non existent problem that might occur down the road and also doing it in an as elegant way as possible. But the fact is that "down the road" will never come if you never leave the garage.

One example is a little fun halloween project I did last year. It's nothing more than a simple servo that opens a box after a voice command through amazon Alexa. I a don't do much in the way of motors and electronics. So I tried to find a way to elegantly mount the servo in the box and build something that pushes the lid upwards.

In the end I thought what the heck I'll just glue it down with endless amounts of hot glue hoping that it will stick.

A year later when I wanted to retire my box to save some space it turns out that the glue stuck so well that I had to cut it out. So even if it is not elegant and could gave been done in a much more elegant way it worked and nobody cared how it was done.

No matter how elegant your solution, most of the time you are judged by the result not the how.

Here is the link to the box I was talking about https://youtu.be/BdbjoniAP0s

Re: Ask HN: Did any Show HN posts turn into successful startups?

#85

Post by gbersac »

adam_ellsworth wrote: post #27

I'm curious to see how insomnia is doing as a non-traditional startup in that he didn't "grow" the company (as far as I know). It's one of the best applications we use in our day-to-day workflow.

Insomnia has a better design than postman, but lack the habillity to transfer data from one request to another... So I am still with postman.

Re: Ask HN: Did any Show HN posts turn into successful startups?

#87

Post by realityking »

Contentful (https://www.contentful.com) was originally a Show HN called StorageRoom: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616041

It's now a series C startup with over 200 employees and customers like Spotify, WeWork, Samsung, Nike, Jack in the Box, The British Museum

(I work there)

Re: Ask HN: Did any Show HN posts turn into successful startups?

#89

Post by ivm »

My time tracking app[1] was bootstrapped with over $15k in sales from Show HN[2]. Without a launch like this, it would be much harder to work on it in the first year when organic sales were low.

[1]: https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778077

Re: Ask HN: Did any Show HN posts turn into successful startups?

#90

Post by solacelessons »

eganist wrote: post #77
ph0rque wrote: post #59

I did a Show HN on my side project, AutoMicroFarm, two years ago (although I have been working on it and posting to HN about it much longer than that). Thanks to HN, I was able to get into the YC fellowship program. After launching and not getting any traction, I almost quit. However, I realized I did not know how to do marketing, sales, or customer dev (the "people want" part of "Make something people want"). It wou…

The fact that solacelessons created an account and replied less than a half hour after this comment plus the fact that the business coach's site was directly linked makes this seem to me like a less-than-genuine endorsement. I'm not going to specifically make that assertion (because, well, I could easily be wrong); I'm just saying how it comes across to me-the-reader. :/

It’s an interesting point. I thought it was nice that my client let me know he shared about me on HN and I inturn am supporting him. When comments popped up about my site, I felt the need to acknowledge what people were saying. How is this “less than genuine”?
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